Motorised focus on Olympus CH-2

[kojiki23]

Hello,

I'm sure this has been done a number of times, but here is my try on motorising the Olympus CH-2 focus:



My goal is to automate focus stacking. I'll also try to motorise x-y movements in the near future.

Any comments are welcome!

[crb5]

By coincidence, this week I added a $10 NEMA17 stepper motor controlled by an Arduino board to my Amscope 120 for the purpose of focus stacking. Here's a movie showing about 20 um steps (1 div on fine focus) with Isthmia plankton as an example.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vgnbh1 ... p=sharing[

[kojiki23]

Looks terrific!
What's your system to fix the rod to the focus knob?

Are you planing other improvements?

[crb5]

I used a nylon spacer, glued to the fine focus knob, with a tapped M4 hole to clamp the stepper motor shaft: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15D66vo ... sp=sharing. It is not quite concentric but the motor body rests on a stiff foam pad so that the microscope focus is not subject to such sharp jolts and this also smooths out any small alignment defects. When there is no power applied to the motor, it is easy to turn the focus knob on the other side of the microscope manually in the normal manner. Apart from focus stacking (for which I used CombineZP following Oliver’s advice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouVJnHBMewM) I may attempt to build a plankton flow cell system where it would be useful to take photos at different focal depths.